rtl8723be wifi on HP Stream 11″ – Arch / Ubuntu .. others ..

There are two antennas on this card (rtl8723be). Default drivers limit the power & range dramatically. The same card is used in many notebooks from HP and Lenovo.

Getting within 1m of AP will allow the default driver to connect. Alternatively, use usb wifi or phone tether.

The following procedure was successful with HP Stream 11″ model: 11-r091nr with Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and Arch (Apricity install) kernel 4.7. Update to linux 4.8 did not break this update on Arch, and the driver did not have to be reinstalled.

The HP Stream 11″ (model 11-r091nr) uses antenna #1.
Similar process should yield positive results on other machines using this wifi card.

Confirm that your machine has the rtl8723be:

lspci | grep "Network"

Output should be something like:

02:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter

Make sure git is installed:
for Arch:

sudo pacman -Su git

for Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential git

Clone the repository:
```
git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new
```
** in case of errors try http as opposed to https
Make and install:
```
cd rtlwifi_new
make
sudo make install
```
Check the antenna selection
```
modinfo -p rtl8723be
```
The last line of the output will be something like:
```
ant_sel:Set to 1 or 2 to force antenna number (default 0)
```
Write the “ant_sel=N” selected antenna option to /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf
```
echo "options rtl8723be ant_sel=1" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf
```
Restart and check that wifi works. If not, edit /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf and change the antenna selection to #2. ant_sel=2
```
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf
```
Save and reboot.